Jimmy Carter Won the Cold War

On this 93rd birthday of the Anti-Christ, Gipper-worshipping dittoheads across the blogosphere are squawking like lovesick parrots about how "Reagan won the cold war". But history will reveal the real truth - the man who actually won the cold war was none other than the 39th president of the United States, James Earl Carter.

Carter strongly suspected that the Soviet Union might be a bully. From his grade school years, Carter also knew that the best way to deal with a bully is to make yourself very small and hope they don't notice you. Failing that, offer them your lunch money. Whatever you do, do NOT confront them - it will only make them angrier. Meekly submitting to a wedgie is better than getting a bloody nose. And perhaps in time, the bully will realize you're no threat and let you pal around with him. Carter applied this policy of détente to his dealings with the Soviet Union.

The French word for "I'm your bitch", détente with the Soviets was the dreamchild of Henry Kissinger and Tricky Dick Nixon. But it was future nobel laureate, Jimmy Carter, who perfected it to an artform. When the Soviets began rattling their nuclear sabres in the 70's, Carter cut national defense in order to make us seem less threatening. When the Soviets appeared unmoved by his overtures of peace, Carter offered them an olive branch in the form of the Panama Canal, Nicaragua, Taiwan, Ethiopia, Korea, Yemen, Angola, Kampuchea, and Afghanistan. He was in the process of handing them all of Eastern Europe when he was cruelly tossed out of office by the Moral Majority.

However, Carter's refusal to confront the USSR set the wheels in motion for its eventual collapse. Lured into a false sense of superiority, the Soviets overextended themselves, spreading their influence across the globe in much the same way the Roman Empire did. If allowed to continue on such a course, the Soviet Union would quietly fade away in just a few hundred years. All Reagan did was speed up the process by forcing the "evil empire" into an arms race.

By standing up to the Soviets and forcing them in to an arms race, Reagan brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. If it weren't for Sting's visionary Russians single soothing the tensions between the two world powers, I would very likely be typing this blog from a fallout shelter today. We owe him, and Jimmy Carter, a deep debt of gratitude.

Comments

I know this post is from way back in Feb 2004 but here goes nothing...

Jimmy Carter was to Russia what France was to Nazi Germany , like you said Larry ; a little bitch.

Left nuts ,tree huggers , europeans , intellectuals, feminists , french and other misguided forms of life don't like to give credit to people with a spine.
So forget Reagan.
They believe that if you have a spine then you are promoting hatred and violence...

Just like locking your money in a vault promotes theft.

And bullet proof glass at the bank promotes armed robery.

And it's because policemen arrest criminals that we have criminals, and not the other way around.

Umbrellas cause rain.

Clogs create plumbing.

Floods create beaver dams.

Band-aids cause wounds.

Self-defense causes assault.

Fighting back the country that attacked you caused it to attack you in the first place.

While the humor of this characterization of the Carter years is certainly not lost on me, I don't think it's wise to try to extend such assertions into real political speech as the comment did. Once you start applying funny rants like that to real standards of fairness they don't hold up. To list a few hard-core ass things Carter did: the funding of the Afghan Mujahedeen in order to lure the Soviets into a quagmire (wholeheartedly continued by Reagan but devised by Carter's NSA), Subversion of elections in Japan to maintain pro-US factions in power, support for the South Korean governments massacre of a socialistic uprising on the island of Cheju, a scathing speech about how he had been shown the true dangers of the Soviet Union (in response to the invasion his cabinet had provoked), ending formally the period of Detente before the Reagan years and generally being a pretty hardcore cold warrior+ (sometimes in deed more than in image) as all Post-War presidents have been.

On the Reagan con-side I have less to say. NO ONE in high levels of the Soviet government at the relevant times felt that accelerated military spending had ANYTHING to do with the coup attempt and subsequent collapse. Direct exposure to our superior economic and publication systems as well as revelations about the atrocities of Stalin and Lenin were the major factors in the public upheaval which toppled the government. If Reagan had been in office '77-'84 and Carter from '85-'88 everyone would be saying Carter won the cold war. The truth is we didn't win the cold war, the Soviets lost it. Was it Reagan that opened up their print and television to expose the terrible state that Soviets lived in relative to our numerous cars and diverse groceries? Did Reagan begin the first market privatization in the USSR? Did Reagan give clear diplomatic signals to the Soviet's Eastern European allies that they could liberalize and democratize without being invaded (that one's the real clincher and although Reagan didn't actually DO anything he did make a nifty speech: "Mr. Gorbachev, TEAR DOWN THAT WALL!", maybe I underestimated him...)? None of our presidents ever won the cold war, Gorbachev ended it, but he didn't win it either. But as good proud Americans we can't accept that the man most responsible for ending it, who brought the prospect of freedom and prosperity to 300 million people wasn't from here, in fact he's from one of those barely white countries! There must have been some mistake, it must have been an American. And which president? Jimmy "malaise, double digit inflation, I wasn't even charismatic to begin with" Carter? No, no. We want the straight talking, hard chargin, good lookin actor, yeah that's how it happened, he rode in on a great steed of defense expenditures and slew the red dragon with a magic sword of deficit spending. And the echo chamber has been filled and the myth will be perpetuated.

And what is up with the hatred of the French on these boards. As I exhaustively wrote not 20 minutes ago, the Maginot Line and the consequential uselessness of France in WW2 was a product of a national psyche traumatized by a war which had ended just 20 years earlier and killed about 4.2 million Frenchmen, around an 8th of the total population. By contrast the US has, at any given time 4-6 times the population of France and in all of our wars from the Revolution until today has lost in the neighborhood of 1.3 million people, nearly all soldiers. So in WW1 we lost perhaps 1 in around 2000 citizens, or 0.05% while they lost about 1 in 8, or 12.5% (Frenchmen were roughly 250 times as likely to lose relatives in the war). We have our share of cultural baggage from American war dead and isn't it obvious that the atrocity of WW1 is unlike anything Americans or our forefathers have encountered. Learn a little about how privelaged we are when it comes to warmaking before you bash ANY other nation on earth. Only Brittish have it ANYWHERE near as good as us in terms of low casualties and they generally run at about 10-20 times ours in absolute numbers and 40-80 times as high as a portion of the population. Also those French who "surrendered too soon" lost 25% more lives (500k vs 400k) fighting the Nazis than we lost on Nazis, Italians and Japanese put together. And one more thing, Poland wasn't exactly the big kid on the European block in WW2 but since theyre lining up to kill Iraqis with us, they get no mention (their resistance made the French look pretty succesful).

And no, the use of force does not indicate the lack of a spine. The (almost always) unnesescary application of force indicates the lack of both a heart and a brain.

poland actually FOUGHT the nazis. it just so happens that horses and swords were not much of a match for the german's planes and tanks.

the "almost always unnesesecary (sic) application of force" is what we grown-ups like to call "harsh reality".

the reason britain and the u.s. don't suffer massive casualties is because we are naturally superior people protected by the love of god. if god didn't love us we would get killed and taken over just as much as the french do. we hate the french because god, himself, hates the french. god can smell their rank stench from heaven and it makes him sick. this is the reason we have the line "one nation under god" in our pledge of allegiance. it's more than just a slick catchphrase, it's a divine mandate.

p.s. a lack of force indicates both a lack of spine, and eventually, a lack of life.

I was going to respond to the post by godisdead, but the pedantic, liberal harangue made my eyes glaze over, and I awoke at 3 AM with my face on my keyboard, and a pool of drool had dried on my desktop. (sigh)

I would like to know how he knew that "NO ONE in high levels of the Soviet government at the relevant times felt that accelerated military spending had ANYTHING to do with the coup attempt and subsequent collapse"? Was he there? Did Gorbachev call him daily, confiding in him about his worries that the US economy was too much for him to handle? Perhaps he was a low level bureaucrat, in a small, damp, dimly lit office in the basement of one of those gray faceless Soviet-era buildings in the middle of Moscow?

Actually, it was probably a combination of these two things (our military buildup and our dynamic economy) that caused the USSR to fall, because they understood that the US could continue this pace indefinitely, while they were straining to keep up militarily (and not that successfully).

As far as his defense of French pacifism is concerned ... What they went through cannot be dismissed by noting their traumatic past. Countries, like people often have tragic pasts, but what you do with your future is as important as what happened to you in the past! Some countries, like people, pull themselves out of a painful past and use the lessons learned to become wildly successful, while others, coming from similiar circumstances, become withdrawn and unable to protect themselves or anyone else!

MAN! I'm so serious! (I didn't start out intending to sound like this!)

this site rocks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!010101010111010101001010010101001001001091010101101010010101010102

If the French folded up because of their traumitization after suffering so many casualties in WWI then how did the Germans whip French ass and then continue to fight a long protracted WWII when they suffered equal or worse losses as the French during WWI. The French suffer big casualties because they are losers.

Seem like you need to go back to the drawing board on your cock-eyed world view.

Jimmy "Dhimmi" Carter did some useful things in office, but they were overshadowed by the negatives. I think he had the balls, but he didn't use them because of his almost pathological, "faith-based" misunderstanding of human nature. Too bad... if not for that, we might not have ceded the Panama Canal to China.

You actually make a convincing argument about the Russians opening up their economies leading to the downfall of Communism, etc. But you don't indicate why they did it. Too bad for you it's been addressed by the Soviets themselves: they've as much as admitted they did it because they were scared to death of Reagan, and knew they couldn't succeed against us (certainly not both Reagan and Thatcher) unless they could demoralize us and cow us into doing stupid things (like they did with Carter and Nixon). Opening up their economy and politics was a last, desperate attempt to expand the economy, and they realized when they did it that they were shooting craps.

I will concede that the official, Reagan-is-almighty biographies tend to leave out the profound effect the Afghanistan campaign had on Gorby's fortunes. Can't skip over that. And true, it's Carter's boys who started the ball rolling, and one bad Reagan apple who almost destroyed it (though now the same bad apple is rabidly anti-Bush). But all this does is make it more obvious how atrociously the Democrats behaved in the 80's towards Nicaragua. It's a miracle that Nicaragua came out all right given how the Dems behaved - they did their level best to ruin things. I guess after a few million dead Asians on your conscience, it's easy to sacrifice a few hundred thousand more human lives...

And what is up with the hatred of the French on these boards.

What is up, among other things, is that the French sided with Saddam in 2002-03 while pretending to do the exact opposite in the U.N. Security Council. Our discovery of French surface-to-air missiles, other weapons and spare parts (and bills of lading), and fake French E.U. passports for Saddam regime officials confirmed their duplicity. Their "principled" stand in favor of more "inspections" - one enthusiastically embraced by the world community as a "peaceful alternative" to the Bush doctrine - was revealed as a fraud. A deliberate ruse, and one for which they have not yet apologized. Until then, you will see "hostility on these boards."

I served in the U.S. Marine Corps under President Carter. I followed JC's leadership and we were proud of him as President. He was able to redevelop the US Military force strength or the TiAd system of land, air ground and sea programs. I first hand in the Mohave Desert saw testing of the Cruise Missile, the Harrior was converted to US Marines from the British. The TOW missiles and Carter is credited and Secretary Harold Brown for the Patriot Missile launched in the Persian Gulf War. Technology developed under Carter's leadership and who gets all the credit but President Reagans Hollywood Style not a Christian whom the Christian coalition never supported Carter? I give all the praise including Carter setting up negotiations in the Middle East with Arab nations by placing the Central Command currently used in the Middle East in 1979 to defend against then a Soviet attack on Iran.

I too was in "Carter's Army" which was a joke. Old broken-down 2 1/2 ton trucks, ditto jeeps, physical fitness in line units was almost non-existent. It came as no shock to me when the Iranian hostage rescue went awry, nothing much worked right during those years. Had the Russians actually attacked it was a foregone conclusion what the result would be, quick defeat. It IS true R&D went ahead with many good systems, systems which Carter would have never funded anyhow.

Carter was/is living proof that saying one is a Christian doesn't mean it is so. It would seem his Bible was the revised Socialist Version, the one that involves a lot of cutting (and not much pasting).

Apparently Mr. Godisdead has never done any research on any subject except the % of French losses in WW I. Numerous interviews with officials high in the former USSR show that Reagan's buildup, Reagan's active efforts to pressure the Soviet economy, Reagan's refusal to do ANYTHING that might prop up their economy, pushed the USSR over the edge. Perhaps he obtained his info at the French War Museum, where the dust obscures some of the words

However, Carter's refusal to confront the USSR set the wheels in motion for its eventual collapse. Lured into a false sense of superiority, the Soviets overextended themselves, spreading their influence across the globe in much the same way the Roman Empire did. If allowed to continue on such a course, the Soviet Union would quietly fade away in just a few hundred years"

Jimmy Carter WAS our first WOMAN president! He went through menopause in the White House. ("OH, you poor brute of a killer, I'm wet with compassion") When confronted by international rapists, he would never resist. ("Here, you can have : the Panama Canal; the U.S. embassy in Iran; all of Afganistan. Just don't hurt me, please!")
Does anyone else remember his (in)famous speech about "America is now entering its long, inevitable period of irreversible decline."? Stag-flation? Unemployment? The Japanese buying up ALL of America? "Generic" products?
Carter wasn't WORRIED about our decline; he was PRAYING FOR IT!!! And for the past 25 years, he has been pissed that it still hasn't happened.

The number one reason the Soviet Union collapsed is because their economy couldn't keep up. Number two was the defeat in Afganistan. Carter came to office wanting nothing more than to do right by the Soviets. When they invaded Afghanistan, he reacted like a jilted lover. If he finally adopted sensible policies, it was only after he had exhausted all other possibilities. If the Soviet invasion had occurred before Carter became president, he wouldn't have felt the same way about it. Reagan had a free hand in Afghanistan because the American left was focused on Nicaragua. If Carter had been president at that time, Afghanistan would have been the only place the U.S. was opposing communism. Gorbechev blames the collapse of the Soviet Union on Reagan's refusal to give up anti-missile defense at the Reykjavik summit. That was just the straw that broke the camel's back, but can you imagine Carter doing that?

Ummm....Bullet Bob (ironic name for someone who wants to discuss true Christianity), you must not have read the Bible, or at least the Christian one. The New Testament is filled with examples of socialism, almost bordering on communism. Paul writes in Acts 4:32-35:

32 All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.
33 With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all.
34 There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales
35 and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.

Christ himself also frequently spoke out against material wealth, greed, money lenders, and the excessively wealthy. The Jesus of the Bible would have almost NOTHING in common with the religious right of America, or our system of government and economy. That being said, socialism and communism are inherently flawed economic systems, and capitalism (or some mixed capitalist economy) is obviously the best in terms of productivity and gains (unless you want to talk about pure capitalisms overuse of resources eventually causing it's own collapse, which is why we as Americans aren't "pure" capitalists). But to assume that Christ was somehow a capitalist despite his MANY proclamations against amassing wealth and not redistributing to the poor is not only intellectually dishonest, it borders on outright blasphemy.

The only Biblically approved tax is the tithe -- a 10 percent income tax. The Roman tax collectors, who collected a greater amount than this, are classed with prostitutes as the lowest of the low. Voluntary charity is what the Bible celebrates. This is the opposite of socialism. The purpose of charity in the Bible is to improve the soul of the giver. Jesus said that the poor will always be with us. Socialism aims to elimate poverty be mandating income redistribution.

It never ceases to amaze me how immature right wingers are. It's like your party ideology is be the alpha dog at all costs. Keep electing republicans, maybe once we're all totally screwed by these drooling crooks you'll realize that you participated in killing america.